*For the uninitiated, “interestingness” is an indicator of popularity on Flickr. Essentially, the more people who have accessed a photo, made a comment on the photo, and/or tagged it as a “favorite”, the higher the interestingness of that photo.

Bikewise is a Google Map-based online application created by the Cascade Bicycle Club to track bicycle crashes, road hazards, and thefts. The concept is to share our experiences with researchers, relevant agencies, and other bicyclists with the goal of improving conditions and making bicycling safer and more enjoyable for everyone. To use Bikewise, simply create an account, set-up your profile, and start logging your info. Since the application was developed in the Pacific Northwest, the data is heavily skewed in that direction, but information can be entered for any location.

If you live in Northern California and you weren’t out on your bike this morning… I’m sorry. If I imagined a perfect morning for a bike commute, ordered it up, and had it delivered, it would look exactly like it did today. All I can say is “Wow!”

Google is expanding their “Street View” service from motor vehicle roads to biking and hiking trails. From an article in USA Today:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. —Meet the Google trike.

It’s the sequel, of sorts, to the Google Maps-mobile, a specially rigged car with an antenna, GPS and camera that snaps 360-degree images of neighborhoods for display in the “Street View” section of Google Maps.

Now Google Maps is expanding to biking and hiking trails. A Google employee on a tricycle rides around to snap the same wide-area views.

“Much of the world is inaccessible to the car,” says Daniel Ratner, a Google senior engineer who designed the trike. “We want to get access to places people find important.”

The project just got underway. So far, only a bike trail in Monterey, Calif., is up and running. Google has cyclists out now in California, Italy and the United Kingdom. The company says to look for hiking and biking images from those locations over the summer — along with shots from U.S. theme parks. Google won’t say which ones.

There’s an article posted on Treehugger today titled, “6 Reasons The World Needs More Girls on Bikes”. Umm… perhaps it should have read “women” instead? They’ll probably offend more women than they’ll attract with that title.

I don’t have any idea whether it’s climate change or just plain-old weird weather, but I don’t recall ever seeing as much cool weather in June as we’ve had this year. And this following our strange 100F heat waves of April/May. I’m not complaining as I much prefer the cooler weather, but I had the odd sensation of being time-warped back to November this morning.